by Ben Bova
"Nonsense! That was the first thing the doctors looked for in the autopsy. He died of a stroke."
"He was poisoned by radiation," Gretchko said.
"What?"
Slowly, patiently, Gretchko explained his theory. He went over what he knew about radiation poisoning and its effects on the body. He reviewed the report from London about the plutonium. He reminded Khrushchev about the Sword of Stalingrad.
"Yes," said Khrushchev, his face darkening, "I have seen the Sword in his office, myself. I think it's still there."
"It may have been the murder weapon," Gretchko said.
"How could you prove this?"
Raising a long finger, Gretchko replied, "First, I would examine the Sword to see if the plutonium sample is in it."
"Surely the assassins would have removed it to prevent its being discovered."
"Probably so, comrade. But there would still be residual radiation in the Sword itself, from the plutonium. Quite a bit of radiation, I should think. It could easily be detected by the devices the scientists have."
"I see."
Another finger, "Second, I would examine comrade Stalin's body once more to look for the effects of radiation poisoning. That would clinch the matter."
"Yes," said Khrushchev. "It would, wouldn't it?"
Gretchko leaned back in the armchair and let out a deep breath.
Khrushchev asked, "So you think that the British—Churchill himself—deliberately assassinated comrade Stalin?"
"The British, with American help. Yes. Even if Churchill personally knew nothing of it, someone high in the British government did. Frankly, I can't believe that Churchill knew nothing. He must have approved the plot, at least."
"But that still means that there must have been one or more of our own people involved in the plot, doesn't it?"
"Not necessarily," said Gretchko. "But it would be a good idea to check on all of the Great One's staff. Especially his closest aides. See if any of them have been effected by radiation poisoning."
"Yes. That is a good idea."
Gretchko stubbed out the remains of his cigarette in the ash stand next to his chair. "I know that this may all be pure fantasy, comrade. But at least we can check on the Sword to see if I'm right. If it's radioactive, then we will have to proceed further."
Khrushchev nodded, then got to his feet. Leaning across his desk he extended a stubby arm toward Gretchko.
"Good work, comrade colonel," he said, shaking the younger man's hand once Gretchko stood up. "I will attend to this immediately."
Gretchko nodded, looked as if he wanted to say something more, but then shut his mouth and went to the door.
"I'll keep you informed," promised Khrushchev. "You have done an excellent job."
"Thank you, comrade."
Gretchko left, closing the door softly behind him.
Khrushchev sank back into his chair again.
The British assassinated Stalin? With American help? He marveled at the immensity of the idea. This could tear apart our alliance. It could make enemies of us—if the others ever find out.
It had been an idea of pure genius to put a man like Gretchko on the problem. If he can puzzle out what happened, then others can, given time.
Time is important now, Khrushchev told himself. I can't allow our alliance with the West to break up until the Hitlerites are totally defeated. Let the Americans break their backs on Japan, we have a decade of reconstruction ahead of us. What the Soviet Union needs now is a time of peace, so we can rebuild and heal the wounds of this damned war. This is no time to go accusing Churchill of assassinating anyone.
Later, perhaps. If it ever becomes necessary. For now, the thing to do is remain quiet and pretend we suspect nothing.
Poor Gretchko. He'll have to be silenced. And I'll have to get that damned Sword out of Stalin's office and off someplace where no one can be hurt by it. Or examine it.
Chapter 28
Berlin, 28 April
Jarvick stood flat against the slim shelter of the doorway, breathing hard. Up the street the Sherman tank burned furiously. Nobody had gotten out. Some sonofabitch in one of those upstairs windows had hit it with a panzerfaust round. Now they would have to go up the street on their own, without armor support, and clean out the nest of snakes that was hiding in one of those buildings.
It looked like it wanted to rain, but Jarvick thought that the gray sky was more from the fires burning through the city and the thick clouds of plaster and concrete dust that choked the air. Berlin was being blasted apart, one building at a time.
Hollis came out from the interior of the building, clutching Kinder's Thompson submachine gun.
"Is he dead?" Jarvick asked.
Hollis's face was grimy, his eyes hollow with fatigue. The grasshopper had turned into a grim, dust-caked dogface, just like all the others of the squad. They had been fighting street by street, building by building, for five days now.
Patton's grand dash to Berlin had turned into a nightmare of grinding ceaseless hand-to-hand killing.
"The medics think he'll make it," Hollis said, his voice hoarse, "if they can get him back to the field station."
"Think the Krauts would shoot at a stretcher team?"
Jarvick asked.
"Beats me."
Kaplan had been killed by a booby-trap mine yesterday.
Loller had taken a beautiful flesh wound in the upper arm.
Sanderson had disappeared during a firefight earlier that morning. Jarvick and Hollis were the only ones left of the original squad that had parachuted into Normandy less than a year earlier.
They saw DiMaggio coming up other side of the street, hugging the wall, rifle in both hands. He saw them and sprinted across the rubble-littered street. A machine gun chattered and bullets kicked up chips of paving. DiMaggio dived the last couple of yards into the doorway, knocking Hollis inside as Jarvick tried to melt himself into the stone doorway while bullets chipped away inches from his shoulder.
"Christ almighty!" DiMaggio spat concrete dust and sat up inside the safety of the doorway. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"What'd you expect?" Hollis yelled back. "Flowers?"
Jarvick could feel the sweat dripping down his back, beading his forehead and upper lip. But he had seen the gun flash when the Germans had opened up. He knew which window they were shooting from.
"Captain says we gotta take out that German pocket up ahead. Tanks can't get through unless we clear out the Krauts from the upper stories."
"That's just great," Hollis griped. "Now we're protecting the fuckin' tanks."
"I saw their window," Jarvick said tightly. "If we had a bazooka we could knock 'em out from here."
Hollis shook his head. "Best we got is rifle grenades. We'll have to work in closer."
"Yeah."
Hollis called up what was left of the squad from the interior of the building. Reluctantly, warily, they steeled themselves to start up the street. Jarvick pointed out the window where he had seen the German gun flashes. The heavy-weapons men plastered it with automatic rifle fire as the others scurried, bent over double, a few doorways up.
Then they covered the window with rifle and Tommy gun fire as the BAR men moved up.
It was methodical, almost mechanical. They had done it a hundred times before. It always worked. But it always cost.
One of the replacements, so new that Jarvick had not learned his name yet, fitted a grenade into the launching attachment on his rifle. The kid knelt behind the blackened hulk of the Sherman to take aim while the rest of the squad peppered the window and the ones next to it to keep the Krauts' heads down. The kid fired. A dull boom, then dirty gray smoke poured from the window.
"Got 'em, first shot!" the kid exulted.
Hollis gestured for three of the men to cross the street and advance to the doorway of that building. No one fired at them as they worked their way up the street on the far side, past the burning Sherman tank. Within minutes the whole squad had entere
d the building, through the shattered wooden front door, and cautiously nosed through its rooms. No one left alive. Up in the room they had shot at, four kids in German field gray coats lay sprawled in their own blood. One of them could not have been older than twelve.
Hollis gathered the squad together on the ground floor.
"Okay, Joltin' Joe, go tell the captain that it's safe for the goddamned tanks to come up this far."
But before DiMaggio could get to the door they heard the clanking grumble of a tank out in the street. Coming the other way.
"Kraut tank?" Jarvick asked.
DiMaggio peered out the doorway. "Ain't one of ours, that's for sure."
Automatically the men checked out their grenades. They had nothing heavier.
"Christ, I didn't think the Krauts had any armor left,"
Hollis muttered as he stuck his head out the doorway.
The tank was low and wide and painted a light brown. A huge cannon poked out from its turret. And there was a red star painted on its front.
"Hey! I think they're Russians!"
The tank stopped half a block up the street, its gun pointing at the burning Sherman. The turret hatch popped open and a man in an odd-looking steel helmet raised his head cautiously.
"Amerikanski?" he called out, in a high tenor voice.
Hollis and DiMaggio stepped out onto the pockmarked street. A ray of sunshine broke through the smoke as they raised their hands and waved.
"Amerikanski!" Hollis yelled, his voice cracking. "You guys Russians?"
Jarvick came out beside them. "Tovarish!" he hollered.
The one word of Russian he knew.
"Tovarish!" the Russian called back. From behind the tank came a full squad of soldiers armed with submachine guns, all yelling "Tovarish" and practically dancing up the street toward the Americans.
From his position on the rooftop across the street, fifteen-year-old Oswald Kaltenbrunner tried to ignore the pain in his legs as he listened to the invaders shouting at each other. He had lost a lot of blood, but he still had the sniper's rifle that the group leader had entrusted to him.
Dragging himself to the edge of the roof, he looked down to see the barbarian Russians and mongrel Americans embracing each other, shouting and hooting like the pack of wild animals they were. Oswald checked the rifle's magazine.
He had only one bullet left. I will put it to good use, he told himself.
Down on the street, three stories below, the invaders were prancing with glee. Oswald pressed his eyes against the telescope sight and tried to keep his hands from shaking. It was not fear, he knew; it was fatigue, shock from loss of blood, pain from the wounds in his legs.
One of the Russians. Their officer. Oswald had memorized Russian insignia and rank markings. There. A swine of a captain. Probably the commander of several tanks. He sighted carefully, trying to keep the crosshairs of the telescope squarely between the broad shoulders of the Communist pig. His hands trembled so much that it was difficult.
The rifle was heavy and he was utterly exhausted.
Jarvick saw the captain grinning at him and extending his hand. He took the Russian's hand in his own and said, "Are we glad to see you!"
"Da," said the captain. "Tovarish. Da."
Hollis came up and pounded the Russian on the shoulder.
"Got any vodka?" He laughed.
The bullet missed the captain's shoulder by a centimeter and smashed into Hollis' chest, knocking him backward off his feet. He felt nothing as he saw the building tilt crazily and then the gray smoky sky was all he could see. He could not move, but he heard gunfire and men swearing in two languages. Then the pow sound of a tank cannon and an immediate huge crumbling roar of an explosion. Black smoke drifted across the sky; rubble pelted down.
He saw faces hovering over him, blurry, out of focus, growing dim. One of them might have been Jarvick, looking sick and sorrowful.
"Not you," Jarvick said, breaking into tears. "Not you, buddy."
"Jesus, I think he's dead." Those were the last words Hollis heard.
The bunker was filled with fumes, a hazy drifting cloud of dust shaken loose by the ceaseless artillery pounding that had been going on for more than twelve hours up on the surface. Even this deep underground the rumble and thunder of the exploding shells pervaded everywhere, like the thudding of a heart convulsed by fear.
To Martin Bormann it seemed almost like a mystical scene from the Götterdämmerung, with a magical mist rising from the sacred river. But no, it was the dry chalky dust from the concrete slabs of the bunker. How long before even these thick reinforced walls and ceilings are smashed through? How long before the Russians and Americans shoot their way down here?
Hitler had not come out of his bedroom all day. He had screamed at Heinrici and the others for hours last night as he moved pins and flags representing long-destroyed battalions across his tabletop map of the city. He called the soldiers up above weaklings and cowards, even accused Heinrici and his staff of deliberately throwing the battle away to the Russians and Americans. Tough old Heinrici was shaken; once Hitler had stormed off to his room it had taken Bormann a half-hour to convince the general that he had not taken the Führer's tirade literally.
"Have no fear that you will be shot by an SS bullet,"
Bormann had told him.
Heinrici had taken the hint. "No hand will strike me down," he had said, raising his own right fist, "except this one."
Now Bormann paced the length of the situation room alone. The relief map on the table was forgotten. He had sent all the others away, their faces white with fear and the knowledge of imminent death. He had a duty to perform, an obligation. How long should he wait?
The door at the far end of the long narrow room was opened by the guards stationed on its other side. An SS captain entered, strode up to Bormann, clicked his heels and saluted.
"Heil Hitler!"
Bormann flapped his hand in return. "What is the situation up there?"
The captain's face was blackened with smoke and grime, his uniform caked with gray dust and splotches of brown mud. But beneath the signs of battle his handsome Aryan face was set with determination. A true Hitler youth, fearless, actually delighting in the carnage of battle.
"The Russians and Americans have united. The city is almost entirely in their hands. Only the chancellery above us is still held by our men. They are fighting to the death."
Bormann ran a hand across his stubbly jaw. He had deliberately refrained from shaving for the past two days.
His last hope had been that the Bolsheviks and the Americans would somehow turn on each other. Now he saw that he had been clutching foolishly at a straw. Time for his final plan.
"Captain, I want you to shower and get into a clean uniform. Quickly. Then I have a vital task for you to perform."
Bormann would be getting into another uniform, too.
The field gray uniform of a plain soldier of the Wehrmacht.
He stood a better chance of escaping this death trap as an ordinary soldier than as the infamous Martin Bormann.
"Don't shoot at any tanks," said the battalion commander.
"Any tanks you see, they're either ours or Russians."
Staff Sergeant Al Rosenberg heard the order in his helmet earphones. His Sherman tank was buttoned up tight, pushing through a makeshift barricade of loose cobblestones and what looked like old furniture. The Krauts had put it up to block the broad avenue but the junk was no match for a Sherman.
Through the narrow viewing slit of his tank's turret Rosenberg saw an old bedspring rear up in front of the Sherman and then disappear beneath its treads. Nobody firing at them. Nobody in sight.
"Look out for mines," he said into his intercom microphone.
The deafening roar of the diesel engine made ordinary conversation impossible; even shouting at the top of his lungs sometimes did not get down to the driver sitting just a few feet below him. Rosenberg remembered that when he had started training, a millio
n years ago, tank commanders instructed their drivers by nudging them on the shoulders with their boots. The intercom radio was a helluva lot better, Rosenberg thought.
The hot burning anger he had felt a week ago no longer blazed inside him. The Germans were no longer tamely surrendering; they were fighting here in Berlin, fighting hard, and fear was what churned in his guts now. Still, underneath it all he still saw those haunted faces of the concentration camp prisoners, still felt a simmering hatred for each and every German in the world.
The rubble-strewn avenue opened onto a wide plaza.
Most of the buildings around its perimeter were smoking, shell-pocked. Straight ahead was a huge building fronted by a wide stone stairway. Rosenberg could see gun flashes coming from the darkness behind the pillars at the top of the stairs.
"That's the chancellery! Right in front of us!" the battalion commander sounded excited.
There were little knots of infantrymen huddled here and there on the plaza, kneeling behind piles of rubble, crouched in shallow shell craters, even sprawled prone on the pavement. They were all firing into the chancellery building.
"Be careful not to hit any Russians," Rosenberg heard in his helmet earphones. "They'll be in brown coats. The Krauts are in gray."
Fashion report, Rosenberg thought.
"Stop here," ordered the battalion commander. "Fire at will on the chancellery building. Into the portico area at the top of the stairs."
Hitler's under there, Rosenberg thought as he turned the turret slightly and leveled the 75 millimeter cannon at the gun flashes. Beside him, his loader, a blond beardless kid named Jimmy, shoved a shell into the gun's breech and slammed it shut, then banged him on the shoulder.
Rosenberg pulled the trigger. The noise jolted him the way it always did and the turret filled with smoke. But we're not gonna pop the hatch to clear the fumes. Not now. Not yet.
"Come on, Jimmy," he shouted at his loader. "Speed it up."
Jimmy's face was streaming sweat. He nodded sullenly, closed the breech and punched Rosenberg's shoulder harder than usual. Rosenberg fired again. And again. The top of the chancellery steps were lost in smoke and dust but all the tanks kept on pumping shells into the area.
